Knutepunktet / Portfolio | Martine Braathen

About

Today, voluntary organizations primarily connect through informal networks, social media, or personal relationships. While most clubs and associations are willing to collaborate, cooperation often happens sporadically and depends heavily on individual initiative. The main needs revolve around better coordination, clearer information flow, more arenas for collaboration, and stronger support for recruitment and organization.

Our proposed solution is a digital meeting place that brings volunteers together and strengthens existing opportunities for children and youth. It serves as a collaborative platform across organizations and creates space for young people to actively contribute. In doing so, we aim to foster greater engagement, broaden local offerings, and build a stronger culture of volunteerism.

Findings

Information dissemination

Opportunities and activities are scattered and difficult to navigate, making it challenging to stay informed and potentially contributing to exclusion. At the same time, the many channels also offer strong potential for reaching and engaging a broader audience.

Activation and engagement among young people

Attendance is low, and one-off cultural initiatives can limit sustained participation. Young people need a sense of ownership, responsibility, and to feel heard in order to truly engage.

Opportunity to learn from each other in volunteering

Administrative work and formal requirements make it challenging to initiate and contribute to volunteer efforts. At the same time, there is significant potential to learn from one another and simplify the way volunteer work is organized and carried out.

Proposal

Knowledge
How can we facilitate the sharing and transfer of knowledge among volunteer coordinators? Each individual holds valuable experience and insight, yet this knowledge is rarely systematically exchanged. By creating space for dialogue and structured knowledge-sharing, volunteers can recognize one another as strong resources and learn from each other’s practices.

Coordination
How can collaboration between clubs be strengthened through clearer alignment of plans and activities? Is it possible to automate parts of this coordination in order to avoid adding extra administrative work? By synchronizing schedules and improving transparency, clubs can better support one another and create a more cohesive local offering without increasing their workload.

Sharing
How can this sense of collaboration and community be made visible and inviting to others? By communicating a unified overview of leisure activities to external audiences—such as local parents, newcomers, and students living away from home—it becomes easier to present a collective and accessible leisure offer that reflects the strength of the volunteer community.

The volunteers

Our proposed solution offers a platform where both knowledge sharing and internal coordination within the volunteer sector are brought together in one place. Sports clubs are connected with other leisure clubs, cultural organizations, volunteer groups, and the municipality. The notice board and idea bank highlight knowledge exchange between different actors, while the shared calendar and chat function emphasize practical coordination.

Tomi’s journey:
Tomi, who leads the ski group at Sandnes IL, is looking for other volunteers who have the expertise she needs. She wants tips, advice, and inspiration for improvements she is planning for the ski slope. She posts a message on the notice board and is encouraged to explore a collection of posts for inspiration. There, she discovers others who have carried out similar initiatives and can get in touch with them. Once the organizational details are in place, she uses the shared calendar to coordinate the timing of the event.

The engaged youth

The engaged youth are those who already hold central roles within the volunteer sector, such as young children’s coaches, youth employees in clubs, and members of the Youth Council. By giving them greater trust and opportunities to contribute to knowledge sharing, their engagement can grow even further and spread to other children and young people, breathing new life into volunteer work. Based on this approach, these young people hold the same roles within Knutepunktet.

Elvie’s journey:
Elvie is a children’s coach who has recently found it particularly challenging to keep track of the kids. She posts a message and receives tips and advice from another coach who has faced and solved the same issue. Inspired by this, she develops proposed solutions and shares them with her supervisor.

Those on the outside

The part of the project focused on sharing explores how the collective volunteer offerings can be communicated to recipients while simultaneously creating added value.

Marisa’s journey:
Marisa is a mother who has recently moved to Kirkenes from Tana for a new job and wants to find more suitable activities for her son. Through the Knutepunktet website, she can not only access information about individual offerings, but also see how they interact with each other, both practically and socially. She has access to an overview of local clubs and can view what is posted on the volunteer calendar and notice board.

The snowball model

We use the snowball model to illustrate how small initiatives can create increasing momentum over time. As these changes continue to roll forward, they grow in both scale and impact, and in the long term can lead to larger and more lasting improvements.

1. Generate interest and make it accessible and easy to use

2. Introduce the new app in a simple and clear way

3. Facilitate greater collaboration and a more cooperative volunteer community

4. Increase civic engagement and participation in the local community, keeping volunteerism alive

If you have any questions about the project, please contact:

Einar Sneve Martinussen
einarsneve.martinussen@aho.no
+47 235 26 075

Nina Greiner Iversen
nina@svu.as
+47 480 68 156